Good morning, everyone. Happy Friday. We will kick things off this morning with SouthState Bank Corporation, SSB. SouthState Bank Corporation operates as a community-oriented, full-service commercial bank with a strong focus on small and mid-sized business lending and a retail banking footprint in the Southeast region, where they have roughly $40 billion of deposits from the Carolinas down to Florida, in Texas, roughly $9 billion of deposits, and up in Colorado, $4 billion. The company's last acquisition of Independent Bank closed in early 2025 and is valued at about $2.5 billion. Market cap today, $10 billion. Bank has total assets of $70 billion and roughly 350 branches. We are pleased to have John Corbett, Chairman and CEO, with us today. John has been with the organization since 1999, became the CEO of CenterState in 2015, and has led the combined company since the 2020 merger.
On my left, with John today is Steve Young, SouthState's Chief Strategy Officer. Steve wears a number of hats across the organization, including strategic planning, wealth management, and balance sheet management, and he also plays an active role in M&A. Great to have both of you with us this morning. I think John is going to kick it off with some prepared comments and a presentation, and then we will sit down for the Q&A.
All right, thank you, Terry. Good morning. This is our first time at the BancAnalysts Association of Boston Conference, and kind of feel like the kid at Thanksgiving that finally grows up big enough that they can sit at the adult big boy table. Gerard, thank you for the invitation allowing us to be here. Late 1990s, I was a 30-year-old commercial banker in Central Florida, worked for a large national bank that had been part of the M&A wave in the 1990s in Florida. The bank was going through growing pains. The bank had participated in that M&A wave, and they were trying to figure out how to reorganize the bank, and they hired outside consultants to come in from New York and reorganize the company.
It seemed like, as a 30-year-old banker in a local market, that every reorganization that occurred moved the decision-making further and further away from the client. The clients were becoming more frustrated, which meant the bankers were becoming more frustrated. I was very fortunate and blessed to work with a mentor of mine by the name of Ernie Pinner, who was the Regional President of Central Florida. He came, he says, "John, looks like you are frustrated. I am frustrated too. Why do not we go out and start our own bank?" Which I did not know you could do that at 30 years old. But in the 1990s in Florida, you could start a bank with $5 million in capital.
We didn't have $5 million in capital, but we passed the hat around town, and largely based upon Ernie's credibility in the market, we raised the money, started the bank in early 2000s. Our premise was that if we focused on four fundamental things, we could create a lot of value for our clients, for our team, and ultimately for our shareholders. Those four theses revolved around, number one, we wanted to be a growth company. We wanted to be a growth company that built scale in our markets, built on relationship, low-cost deposits. Number two, we wanted to position the bank and situate it in the fast-growing suburbs. At that time, it was the suburbs around Orlando and Tampa, Florida. We just felt like there was a rising tide that was occurring in those markets.
Number three, going back to the consultants centralizing things at the bank we were at and taking away the empowerment of the local market, we wanted a business model that was more entrepreneurial and put decision-making closer to the client. Fourth and finally, we wanted to have a bank that performed at an elite level, a top quartile level, and that meant everything, from asset quality metrics to earnings and return metrics, client satisfaction, employee engagement, and ultimately shareholder return. So, it's been gratifying, looking back over the last three decades, to see how that company and that vision evolved to a scale far greater than we ever imagined.
If you think about the deposit franchise that we built, the way we look at the company and the map is that many of these metropolitan areas that we operate in have grown to such an extent that they're merging together. The suburban markets are becoming part of the metro markets. So, Orlando to Tampa, along the I-4 corridor, that's an area that we hold a number three deposit market share on banks that are regional banks under $250 billion. But where we live in between that, we kind of call that downtown Orlampa, as those markets have merged together. Same thing if you go up to Atlanta and the I-85 corridor from Atlanta to Greenville to Charlotte, North Carolina. That's become Charlanta in that super region, and we hold a number three market share amongst regional banks there. Colorado, Front Range, number two. Texas Triangle, number four.
Then perhaps the market that we have the strongest scale in is in coastal areas of Charleston, Savannah, Hilton Head, number one market share with $9 billion in deposits in those markets. Somebody asked Warren Buffett one time what the secret to his wealth was, and he said, "The secret to my wealth started when I won the ovarian lottery." It was simply the fact that he was born in the U.S. in a place where business, creativity, entrepreneurialship was strong, and he could invest in that growth. I kind of feel that way about the career of many of our bankers. We were just blessed and fortunate to grow up in the banking business in Florida that was a fast-growing market. What this map shows you, it's the Census Bureau map of domestic migration in the U.S. since the COVID era.
These have always been fast-growing markets in the Southeast and Texas, but since COVID, that growth has just accelerated. If you think about where SouthState markets are the most prominent, the first is Florida. That is our largest market. The second is Texas, and the third is in South Carolina, and that is where the majority of the domestic migration has occurred in the U.S., with Florida number one, Texas two, and then Carolinas number three. Back to this local leadership model about getting decision-making closer to the client. We wanted to build an entrepreneurial system, and we wanted to empower bankers more than they were in a larger national type of organization. How do you do that? How do you empower and equip frontline bankers? Well, one way is to give them income statement control.
If you give them income statement control, there is a lot of freedom that comes with that, but there is also income statement accountability. It is really about taking a regional president, and rather than diminishing the role to be that of a sales manager, elevating that role so they think like a CEO and they think like a shareholder. We feel like if you do that and you can attract the best bankers, you will ultimately attract the best clients. After three decades, we are now seeing that in our client satisfaction ratings, top quartile, J.D. Power, net promoter score, top quartile on commercial for Coalition Greenwich. We are really proud of the top decile ranking of employee engagement of financial institutions in the U.S.
If you do those things right, if you take care of your team members, you take care of your clients, ultimately, that leads to great financial returns, and durable financial returns. If you look at the return on assets for SouthState over a one-year period, a five-year period, a 20-year period, it has consistently outperformed the peer group. That financial return performance is built on low-cost funding, lower than peers for each of those periods, one year, five year, 20 years, and superior credit, and consistently better than peers over a one-year, five-year, and 20-year period. At the end of the day, if you do this right, it ultimately drives what you care about in your laptops there today, which is driving EPS growth and tangible book value growth.
If you look here over the last 20 years, despite a series of M&A deals, the company has had an EPS growth rate, CAGR, 8%. That is double the EPS growth rate of the peer group. You say, "Well, gosh, if you are doing a lot of M&A, it is easy to drive EPS up, but you are probably diluting tangible book value per share with a series of deals." If you look, our tangible book value per share growth, again, double that of the peer group that we sit in. If you do those things right, you build tangible book value over time, ultimately it is going to lead into superior shareholder returns. If you look at the peer group of 16 banks that make our peer group, the shareholder returns are in the top quartile over multiple cycles. Turning to 2026 priorities.
2024 was when we announced the Independent Financial deal, which was Texas and Colorado. 2025 was the year that we converted and integrated that deal in the summer. Early 2025, we had the tariffs, we had integrations, we had conversions, growth was slowing down somewhat. As we thought about 2026, and we thought about our company stepping back from M&A at the same time super regional banks were leaning into M&A, it was creating a lot of disruption in our markets. We calculated with the deals that were announced in 2025, there were $124 billion of deposits that were going to go through a systems conversion, not in the total amount in our states, but in the MSAs that we had branches, $124 billion.
Wouldn't this be a great time during all that creative destruction process of M&A to expand and invest in the sales force of the company? We had a goal, and we said, "Let's see if we can invest and expand the commercial relationship management team by 15%-20% over a two-year period." Here we are, we're one year into that two-year plan, and we're already up about 13% increase in commercial RMs in our geography. I feel like that's been a success that's exceeded our expectations. The other thing, back to early 2025 with the tariffs and low single-digit growth, we wanted to get the growth engine going.
When you go through an M&A deal, an integration, the way I kind of look at it is you got to get through the relationship building side first, then you got to work your way through the conversion second, and then you got to get the growth machine up and running. We wanted to prove to the market that the organic growth nature of our company would continue. We've gone in the last year from low- single to mid-single digit growth to this year operating at a high- single digit growth. The last year, loans have grown 9% year-over-year, and deposits have grown 7% year-over-year. We also knew that following a sizable acquisition, those of you in the investment community typically take a wait-and-see approach. Let's see how they do. Let's see if they can hit the numbers.
First year, we had 32% earnings per share growth, shortened the earn-back period from roughly a two-year at announcement to probably closer to a one-year earn-back. There's always skepticism. Can you integrate? Can you move into a new market? We had a lot of confidence that we were succeeding in that integration effort. The company had very strong earnings. 2025 return on tangible equity was 20%. We said, "We know the stock valuation's going to lag, let's lean in. Let's use some of these earnings that we've generated in this deal." We repurchased 5% of the company starting a year ago. Now, over the last year, the stock's up about 20%. From a timing standpoint, we felt like that was the appropriate time to really lean in.
Repurchased 5% of the shares, which also equated to retiring 20% of the shares that we issued in connection with the acquisition in the last year. Finally, a year ago, artificial intelligence was a big deal, but it wasn't near the big deal it is today, and we were working on generative AI solutions for our company, new generative engine optimization for our website, and these types of things. That would be a fourth priority for the company, and we can talk about those as we proceed. Terry, maybe we could move to the fireside.
Yeah, that was great. Thank you, John. You talked a lot about operating in markets with high population growth, net in-migration, but that also has brought with it competition. How do you think about growth over the short term, the longer term, and as you think about your 2027 focus, a year from now, how do you think growth is going to look?
Yeah. Competition's nothing new here. Everybody's talking about increased competition. I look back over the last 30 years. If you go pre-financial crisis, there were 315 banks operating in Florida. There were 300 banks operating in Georgia. Two-thirds of those banks are gone since the financial crisis. Yeah, there's new entrants. In the scheme of things, the competition really is not anything that we haven't faced in the past. We've always aspired to be a grow everything good in the bank at a 10% rate. That's an aspirational level. This year, we're coming close to that on the loan side. We guided in 2026 to mid to upper single-digit growth. We've achieved that on the upper end. In the short term, we did see the big spike in interest rates in September, and we saw our pipelines dip a little bit.
We started the year with a loan pipeline about $4.8 billion. Pipeline surged in the first quarter to $6.5 billion. Since that time, we pulled through a lot of those deals. After the third quarter, the pipeline dipped about 14%, but we're still a little bit higher than we were at the beginning of the year. Given those fact pattern, we kind of see probably mid-single-digit growth in the fourth quarter, but we think as we move into 2027, it's kind of back to that range of mid to upper single-digit growth.
Perfect. Can you discuss some of your lines of business with a broader reach outside of traditional banking activities, and what are the opportunities and how do you manage the risk?
Sure. Good morning, everyone. Glad to be with you. I'll just highlight one line of business that's more of a fee line of business that we have that's a bit unique to us is our correspondent capital markets area. We've been in that business since 2008, so the financial crisis in 2008, we got into that business. It's been a really great fee generator for us. It's really operational risk and not credit risk. We don't take credit risk in that. Really, two or three things that we do in that line of business, which over the years have built up. We went from zero clients to about 1,200 financial institutions and asset managers. We do fixed income for banks and asset managers. We've been doing that for 17, 18 years. We do interest rate swaps. We do payments, which would be FX payments.
Then we're adding some products like commodities and other things. Anyway, that's been a really good line of business. That business over the years, it's a little bit rate sensitive. So in 2020/ 2021, I think those fee income businesses hit a little over $100 million of revenue. This last year, it was around $90 million of revenue. So it's a significant line of business. It's a little different than what's normal. I would say for us, it helps us relative to interest rates. So if you think about net interest margin, we've always seen it as a hedge. So when rates go up, typically our net interest margin goes up and does a little bit better. That business does a little bit worse in the short run. As rates fall, this business does a little bit better and kind of helps hold up the revenue.
Perfect. On the NIM, it's running mid to high 3.70s. How do you think about the repricing of deposits over the near term, and what's your thoughts about the margin going forward?
Sure. We just talked about this on the call. There is a lot of movement in rates. I guess for us, there is really about two or three key things that we are thinking about relative to our margin. If I kind of walk you back to quarter two, I think our deposit costs were $1.76, so call it $1.75-ish. Then they started raising rates in September. If you kind of think through the aspects of NIM. Now we have two rate hikes in our forecast. So September already happened. We think there is one coming in December. Really, on that, it is the floating rate loans, which is about 39% of our book, vs sort of exception-priced deposits. We are trying to manage, as those floating rate loans go up, that is about $20 billion vs the exception price.
There is probably a basis point or two of we are pretty neutral, but probably a basis point or two positive to NIM. The second is just the fixed asset repricing, which is a big piece of our story. We have about $5 billion of legacy loans that are not marked that are coming due over the next five quarters, that are fixed repricing, that are about 515 or so in coupon. Depending on where the yield curve is when those reprice, there is a percentage point or so ahead of that, maybe a percent and a half, depending on how steep the curve is. Then, we have a securities book, so that continues to reprice about a billion dollars a year. So, those are components. The third component is just around new production. Of course, as we get a steeper yield curve, that is better.
If we get a flatter yield curve, not as much. All those components, there is some People talk about the NIM vs NII debate, and there certainly is some of that there. If you kind of think about the fixed asset repricing over the next 12 months- 18 months, it is pretty powerful, assuming we keep this yield curve.
Perfect. Maybe one more from me, then I will open it up to the audience. You closed the Independent acquisition early 2025, entering Texas, Colorado. How is the integration going? Other banks have maybe stumbled a little bit for a number of reasons. How are you doing as a new entrant in that market?
Yeah. I look at a merger as a marriage of people, not a combination of PowerPoints and spreadsheets. The dating relationship that we had with David Brooks from Independent, that founded that bank 36 years prior, was about a six-year-long dating relationship. In fact, when we got close to announcing the deal, the only time we could meet was on Valentine's Day, and we met at a steakhouse, and they brought us a rose. We had a long dating relationship, David and I. The way I mentioned it earlier, that you can measure success in a deal like that is, first of all, can you build relationships with the team? I knew I had a close relationship with David, but would our teams come together?
One of the things that we've learned through many acquisitions is the importance of extending that dating relationship from the CEO down to the frontline market leaders. One of our strongest leaders that was president of the state of Florida, his name Mark Thompson. He and his wife Rebecca moved to Dallas a year before we had the conversion, and his job was to be the highest-paid party planner in the state of Texas. We didn't want him talking about business. We just wanted him inviting groups of five or six bankers from Charlotte, Tampa, Atlanta, in small groups, meeting five or six of the bankers from Independent, and just sharing stories about their family, getting to know people. I think Mark did a fantastic job in that relationship-building process.
All of the geographic leaders at Independent that started with us are still there today. We did a great job, I believe, Mark did, with the relationship building with Dan Strodel, his counterpart in Texas. We got through the conversion. Then can you get the growth coming back at the end? We do. We've now got the Texas, Colorado markets growing at the same pace that the bank is growing in the Southeast, and we have this hiring initiative. The goal was to grow 15%-20% in two years. Texas is leading the way. They've expanded their commercial sales force by 22% in just one year.
Great. Any questions in the audience? We'll work our way down. Thank you, in the back.
Tony Ong, JP Morgan. A follow-up on the correspondent business. Can you just talk about some of the products you have in the pipeline that, over time, could result in upside to the, I think you mentioned $100 million of revenue they are generating today?
Sure, Tony. Thanks for the question. We have been in the FX business for a long time, but we were not into the hedging part of that business, so we were just doing spot trades and have been doing that for 17, 18 years. We are rolling out a platform in, I think it is April, maybe May, somewhere in there, that will allow us to do hedging for our commercial clients and also for other banks. That should roll out at that point in time. We have been ramping up for that over the last year. The other piece is commodities. We have an energy book that we now have in Texas because of the Independent acquisition. Of course, those clients need some energy hedging. It is very similar to the risk profile that we do with our interest rate swaps, and so the framework is very similar.
Those two things are things that we are putting together this next year. Over time, we would like to connect. We have a public finance group in our capital markets area. We have all these municipalities throughout our footprint. We would love to be able to connect those two together. So over time, we think there are some synergies there, but those are a couple of things that we are rolling out.
Thank you. John, on M&A, you talked about the history of M&A that the company has done. How do we balance the organic growth opportunities you have in your footprint today with the history of the company doing deals, this sort of two-year window that banks likely have for doing deals? Thank you.
Yeah. Tony, the way I think about our journey as a company over these three decades, there was about a 15-year period there that was marked by two crises as bookends. The financial crisis in 2008, Silicon Valley crisis, that was our period of crisis and consolidation, and that is how we built the scale, that is how we positioned the company in the markets that we wanted to be in. We have done that now. We are in the markets we want to be in. We are really not looking to expand to other states. The last four or five years have been infrastructure build, since 2020 to 2024, and we used M&A to help pay for that infrastructure build, change out all the technology. Now we are at a place where the company is doing great.
I mean, the growth profile is great, the earnings profile is great, the cultural components of the company are great, and M&A is just not as valuable to us today as it was in that period of crisis and consolidation. Now, can we take the efforts that we put into M&A and put into expanding the sales force of the company to stay front-footed on growth and create operating leverage through that sales force expansion? That is the thinking. Thank you, Tony.
Hey, guys. Good morning. Stephen Scouten, Piper Sandler. John, maybe continuing on that, with the increase in the sales force, does this become maybe, say, like a well-noted peer of yours, maybe more of a flywheel from a hiring perspective moving forward vs the traditional M&A track record? How does your business model kind of being regional president-focused and the kind of in-market profitability metrics you guys target kind of help you to do that maybe better than others could?
Yeah. Stephen, this is nothing new. I mean, organic recruiting, we have been doing this since we started 30 years ago, but we were doing it hand-in-hand with the M&A strategy. Now that the M&A strategy has largely achieved the things that we wanted to achieve, like I said, we are more front-footed on the organic growth. I felt like this last year, because of the disruption in the market, that is when we set a bigger goal, to grow 15% or 20% in a couple years. I think moving forward, probably the long-term business as usual expansion is probably more in that 5%-10% expansion a year. Right now, a lot of this is balancing loan growth, deposit growth, NIM, and the types of bankers that we are seeking to attract to the company would be types of bankers that have more deposit-rich kind of businesses.
We have a homeowners association business where we've got about $2.5 billion in deposits. That's something we'd like to invest in. We just hired a gentleman that was a former banker CEO of a government contracting business to kind of help us start that line of business. This is nothing new. It was kind of a surge in the last year. I see it kind of slowing back down as we balance loan and deposit growth, keeping our loan-to-deposit ratio roughly where it is. But back to the model, I do think that our model is attractive to bankers in the market. Every organization, as it develops, has to decide where is the star that the solar system revolves around in your organization. In some organizations, it's the executives on the 40th floor, and some organizations, it's totally risk-driven.
In our organization, the star that the planets revolve around is these regional presidents, and I think having that authority, empowerment at the local market, and accountability is attractive for folks that are competitive and that want to win.
Great. Maybe just one other would be, noting that M&A is probably the least of your priorities from a capital deployment perspective, but if we get indexing changes to regulatory thresholds, does that change the dynamics for you at all or the thought process of building scale in the midst of that?
Not really, because the scale we've built has achieved what we wanted it to achieve from a return standpoint, and a technology rebuild standpoint. Right now, the level for Category IV, $100 billion, we're $70 billion in size. It seems like there's a fair amount of consensus to move that up on an inflation basis. We'll see. Hopefully, we'll hear something next three or four months. But it does not change our thinking. Even at $100 billion, if it stays where it is, we can continue on this path for many years before we face that hurdle.
Hi. Ryan Kenny with Morgan Stanley. The treasury management platform seems to be resonating, $700 million of new deposits in the third quarter from treasury-related accounts. Can you walk through the strategy and treasury management, how the product has evolved over time, and any investment that needs to be made going forward, especially as you try to expand the low-cost deposit franchise into the Independent Bank footprint in Texas and Colorado. Thanks.
Sure. Yeah, Ryan, I think it's, as John mentioned, it's been maybe a five-year journey. Some of that is technology platform. A few years ago, I guess it's almost been five years ago, we reinstituted a new treasury management platform throughout the footprint, which was helpful because before you have the technology, you really can't sell the product, no matter how great a banker. You need the people and you need the product. You take that technology investment, so now we think we can compete with anyone. The technology is as good as JP Morgan or others. The second piece was our focus on middle market banking. A few years ago, we hired several middle market bankers and sort of worked more on the C&I side of things.
It takes a few years to kind of get moving, but that's really starting to take charge. I think the third thing is just related to the new footprint. Remember, Independent in the Texas and Colorado area, they really didn't have a very good platform, and they would admit, admitted that, which it doesn't allow you to hire the C&I bankers that allow you to build treasury. Over the last year, we did our conversion about a year ago. It's almost been 18 months ago, so it was Memorial Day 2025. Now we've had a little bit of momentum. Takes you about 90 days to get through that, but now you're starting to sell those products and those new footprints, which they really didn't have a great solution.
If you think about that's sort of the evolution over the last five years. In the future, we're investing, we'll see where all this goes, but we're investing in tokenized deposits. We're one of the founding members of the Cari Network. Not sure where all that's heading, but we want to be front-footed in case commercial payments start moving that direction.
And then just as a follow-up, are you seeing deposit competition, especially for low-cost deposits, increase more in certain parts of your footprint like Texas, Colorado, or is it pretty intense throughout the footprint?
Yeah. Yeah, it's funny. I guess the way I would describe it is if you think about Texas and probably Texas and Colorado both, there's been some new entrants into those markets, as you all know. But of course, there were already entrants into that market. There were already one bank already, now we're taking two banks into one bank again. So it's the same number of entrants. But typically, when people go through conversions, and we've done it ourselves over the 25 of them over the last 24, 25 years, people do promotional pricing and those kinds of things to get the client from here to there. We've seen a lot of that in some of those new markets. My guess is over time, that gets a bit more rational because they get through sort of the conversion in the 90 days afterwards.
I don't think there's maybe some intense pricing right now, but I don't know that that's a long-term thing. I think it's always deposit competition, loan competition's pretty always intense. But if you look at the returns that we're putting up and others are putting up, it's pretty reasonable. I mean, the returns are good, and it doesn't seem like it's getting worse.
Great. Thank you.
No problem. Thank you.
Hello. Janet Lee from TD Cowen. As you've transitioned the legacy Independent bankers onto the SouthState model, have you already seen the change in banker behavior and productivity that you hoped for? Does the changing data center development backdrop, just any second-order implications from the evolving landscape, does that change any outlook for the growth opportunities in Texas vs other states?
Yeah, Janet, good morning. Yeah, the bankers that have joined us, those four regional presidents plus the Chief Banking Officer out there, Dan Strodel, they're looking at the model that SouthState provides for them, and they see their role and status being elevated in the company from a sales manager kind of role to acting as a CEO and thinking about CEO decisions and loan pricing, deposit pricing. Much of that was driven from the top down in their prior life. In some respects, it's exciting to them. In some respects, they're not sure how that might affect their incentive plans, and we're going to work through all of those issues with them. But they are starting to think more about profitability. They're thinking more about pricing rather than just strictly growth.
To the data center question, we've been studying this for several months, just thinking about the old adage, anytime there's anything growing like a weed, is it a weed? From a credit standpoint, we've looked at our nine states, where data centers are being constructed, and it's really concentrated in two or three states. There's nothing in Florida. There's really nothing in Colorado or South Carolina. It is Texas, it's Northern Virginia. We're really more Southern Virginia, but then it's also Atlanta and some areas in Georgia. But by far, Texas is the greatest.
One of the things we started asking our underwriters and credit folks to do in the last several months is looking at the potential of a sugar high in those markets, that the second-order effect, the third-order effect, think about the electricians that are doing business there or the concrete providers that are doing business there. They may be providing materials and labor and supplies to the data center construction itself, or their competitors are providing those services, and therefore, they are able to charge higher margins, and maybe they are over-earning because of this short-term construction increase that will come down. I have heard others say it. We have seen it in our own book.
We have got a couple clients that have hotels in those markets where a data center contractor will come in, and they will lease the hotel for two years and write a check for $10 million just so they have a place to house the construction workers. That does not feel durable to me and sustainable. We have tried to put that mindset in our credit underwriters to be wary of the potential over-earning that is occurring in those markets. But yeah, who knows what the implications will be? But clearly, there is anti-construction of data center biases, and for us, it is that Dallas-Austin corridor that we have got to be careful with.
John, one of your fourth priorities for this year was AI. Can you just talk about the efficiency gains you are seeing because of those investments, and how does that impact bank M&A integration, and how do you use that as an advantage?
We meet with investors all the time, and they want a specific answer to, is your efficiency ratio going to go down 3% or 4% or 1%? And it is so early in all this to figure that out with a precise answer. Let me tell you how we are thinking about it, Terry, and how we are communicating it through the company. I talked about the 15-year period of crisis and consolidation. And the last five years of that at SouthState have been infrastructure build, replacing all of our key platforms with the Fortune 500 platforms, the Snowflake, the Salesforce, the Workday, ServiceNow, all those types of things.
Well, during that build-out period of time, as we get into budget season, which we're in right now, we have been growing the FTE count in our support areas, our risk area, our IT area, and it's been growing at a rate that's considerably faster than we've been growing the Salesforce of the company. Each year, Steve, it's probably 6%, 7%, 8% sometimes FTE count growth. The way we're communicating this through the budget process right now is our expectation is now that that build-out is largely complete, and we've got the benefits of AI that are percolating throughout the company, the expectation is that our support FTEs will run flat in 2027 and potentially beyond that. We'll continue to add to the Salesforce FTEs and create positive leverage and efficiencies that way. Encouragingly, our support folks understand the power of AI.
They've seen it in use cases, both generative and agentic, and they're bought into that goal of keeping the FTE flat. I think, it's also an important cultural approach to the company. Instead of having folks that are concerned that we're going to have a 10% layoff or a 20% layoff in the support area, by saying flat, it's a commitment that if you're doing a great job in our support area, we're going to find a home for you, but we're not going to continue the growth rate that we've seen in the last five years of 5%, 6%, 7%, 8% FTE growth.
I would just add just the focus for our team is the revenue producer. We're going to add those, we're going to keep support flat, and that's going to create operating leverage over time, which eventually will hit the efficiency ratio.
That's great. Well, I think we're out of time. I want to thank you both for your attendance this year. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks, Steve.